The wild, blue yonder…
As of very recently, this blog has begun covering film and television (though the primary focus will still remain on music) and to kick things off in the film department, I decided to present my favorite films of 2009 at the half-way point. Sadly, I’ve only seen a handful of films in theaters this year (however, my Netflix account has been smoking, see my Viewing Diary for proof) and so I’ve decided just to devote this space to my favorite film of the year (so far) which is, by a landslide, PIXAR’s Up (dir. Peter Docter). And the way things are going, this very well may top my list in December.
Up (Docter, 2009)
PIXAR, aka the best filmmaking company in the biz today, takes joy in choosing unlikely heroes for their films and they do it like no one else; they’ve introduced us to toys, bugs, monsters, fish, super heroes, cars, rats, and robots and miraculously we’ve cared about them all. For their tenth film, they select what is perhaps their most unexpected hero to date, an ornery, old widower with a walker.
We first meet Carl Fredricksen as a child in a movie house in the 1940s, and I can think of no better place for the adventure depicted in Up to begin. On the silver screen, Carl sees his hero, the explorer Charles Muntz, and wants to venture to faraway lands just like him. Carl soon meets a young girl, Ellie, who shares his passion for Muntz and seeking adventures in exotic lands. Carl is quickly smitten with Ellie and what follows on screen is one of the purest, most touching segments in recent cinema. We see Carl and Ellie’s life from marriage until they are parted by death in a wordless montage that captures the highs and lows, the exciting and the boring, and the pure joy that is possible in marital life.
Carl, now a widower, with nowhere to go and no one at home, decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime in a very unusual method which creates what will be one of the most beautiful images to appear on cinema screens this year: a colorful bouquet of thousands of helium balloons tied to his beloved house– all that’s left of his life with Ellie. Carl’s accidental companion for this adventure to South America is Russell, an Asian-American Wilderness Explorer (think boy scout). They meet some strange, wonderful, and awful characters on their journey and the film only gets better from there. Just in case, by some odd circumstance, that you haven’t seen this film, I won’t say anymore but you really need to go see this movie.
One of the best aspects of Up is the respect it has for its audience. All of PIXAR’s films have been notable in that they could be enjoyed by kids and their parents (good news for parents who’ve been forced to sit through mindless animated features for years). However, Up may be the first PIXAR film that can be appreciated more by adults than kids– though, that’s not to say that kids won’t enjoy it, I’ve heard from several parents that their kids have loved it. The film deals with some weighty issues like aging, infertility, the dissolution of families, and death. All of these are handled delicately and with great class.
Up is a moving film about marriage, adventure, and real love. In fact, its depiction of marriage may be the better than any recent movie that comes to mind. This film will bring hearty laughter and tears and that is why it is so special. It entertains but it also has some real weight and depth to it. It doesn’t sacrifice the enjoyment of its viewers for a message, nor does it rely on mindless chase sequences to the neglect of anything of substance. If more movies were like Up, movie-going would be a much more satisfying experience. But after ten films, this is what we’ve come to expect from PIXAR. Up is a treasure, a work of art, a masterstroke, or to put it simply, just another brilliant PIXAR film.
